


wishbone

by rhapsodies



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: 5+1, F/F, Slap Slap Kiss, but everyone is vaguely miserable
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-27
Updated: 2019-04-27
Packaged: 2020-02-07 04:36:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18613279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhapsodies/pseuds/rhapsodies
Summary: Adora used to know Catra better than she knew herself.





	wishbone

**Author's Note:**

> netflix give the people what they want
> 
> written before season two (which i haven't seen yet) but hopefully nothing is too far out.

i.

Adora used to know Catra better than she knew herself. She knows all Catra’s flaws, all her tells: the way she shifts her balance to her left foot before she feints. The rattle of her breath when she’s winded. The strange, sharp smile whenever she thinks she’s winning. She knows that Catra lacks stamina and brute strength, but her strategies usually tend towards lengthy, grinding battles anyway, in the hope that she finds some weakness, some vulnerability to press.

Before the war, before goddesses and heroes, before either of them had ever set foot in the Woods, Adora had supplemented those weak spots. She’s never been patient; the awful white heat of her temper always spills out, gets her distracted. Still her failings had been distant, muted where Catra would cover her six. There were handfuls of moments when reality would sometimes slam into her: tossing her weapon to Catra, knowing instinctively and without looking that Catra would catch it, would understand; or back to back, the staff slipping from Catra’s hand into Adora’s, Catra twisting around Adora’s body to get their opponent’s neck between her thighs, deadly and graceful, and Adora delivering the final, bruising blow to the stomach of the simulation –

 _I know you._ The thought would come suddenly, without warning: somehow, across all the years of bloodied hits and parries and evasions, they’d become extensions of the other, easy as slipping inside each other’s skin, their rhythms matched as they push and pull, the ebb and flow of this connection trickling between their shadows. She thinks about it when Catra swings her baton at Adora’s head, the tip of it crackling, and Adora automatically sidesteps just out of reach. She thinks about it when she moves to sink her sword into Catra’s stomach and meets nothing but cold air.

“Come back with me,” Adora gasps, tilting her head back to avoid a burst of energy. She doesn’t get a reply: she didn’t expect one. Sometimes she says it just by rote, voice stuck on a feedback loop, like reading lines from a screen. She spins low, swinging her blade towards Catra’s stomach, and Catra saunters away, head tilted, expectant. When Adora chases her down, it’s still faster than she expects, even after all these months in She-Ra’s body – faster than Catra expected, too, from the slightest delay in her move to a defensive stance. Adora swings and their weapons clash, metal screeching and the hum of the stun baton prickling the skin at the back of her neck. She dodges the swipe at her legs that Catra always makes, strikes _hard_ with her sword, and strikes again, forcing Catra to yield more ground. Maybe as a soldier, _only_ a soldier, this wouldn’t have worked, when Adora didn’t have the power of ancients flickering in her body, but _now –_ she twists at Catra’s wrist until the bones grind and the baton drops, holding her blade flat against Catra’s neck. Catra’s legs are tensed, straining against Adora’s weight, and Adora realizes she’s pushed them to the base of one of the twisted, old trees that mutter to her sometimes, when she walks through the Woods alone.

“Come on, then,” Catra snarls, baring her neck. “We both know you’ve been waiting for this, so go ahead and _do it._ ”

And even though Adora knows it’s reckless, knows from all the times she’s told herself this will get her killed, she can’t help it. “You can give it up,” she replies, “You don’t have to stay with them, you know – you _know_ they’re using you. You can come back with me.”

Catra stares back at her. There’s a cut on her arm still bleeding, sluggishly, and when she smiles her mouth is all red – _I did that,_ Adora thinks, and it still surprises her, this lurid revulsion.

“You know I won’t,” Catra tells her.

Distantly, somewhere under the pounding, static runs along Adora’s skin where her leg touches Catra. But still: “Don’t do this.”

Smiling (and _oh,_ Adora despises it, the way it slides right into the soft part of her stomach like butter), Catra says, “You need to let go, Adora.”

“You're not this person,” Adora spits, “I know you're not-”

“You’re really such an awful liar,” Catra says sweetly. Something else Adora knows: when Catra lies.  

One time, when she was still throwing herself headfirst into Horde training for those long, aching hours, Adora had caught the sickness going around the recruits’ barracks. It had ravaged the entire Zone, and a third of the youngest were dead before Healers were brought in; the whole place stunk of it, bodies ripening in the heat and splitting apart, and Adora had lay there trembling in her bed – that’s how it feels, now, when she raises one hand to press her thumb against Catra’s cheek. She can feel the quietest bird-song of a pulse.

“Oh, Adora,” Catra murmurs. “You never learn how to give up.”

A small drop blossoms where the line of Adora’s sword presses into Catra’s skin. “No-” Adora hisses, too late, before Catra gets her palms against the blade and shoves, hard, so that Adora stumbles backward, the weeds scratching at her legs until Catra is on her. She’s been stupid, again, and Catra knows it too; she angles the blade but Catra slips to the side and clasps Adora’s hands in her own, driving the hilt into the dirt and forcing Adora to the ground, face towards the canopy and Catra’s arm around her throat. _I know you,_ like hell.

The pressure dissipates as suddenly as it appeared, but once Adora has gasped in enough cold air, Catra is long gone. She reaches out for her blade, the soil falling away in clumps, and mutters an apology to the Woods before starting to walk, steadfast, towards Bright Moon, her gaze fixed on the sky.

 

ii.

Catra still fights mean and dirty, the way she always used to. It’s the one thing that hasn’t changed.

They’ve cornered her in the Kingdom of Silverglade, the hot, pounding rain spilling off the sides of the bridge and beating down on Adora’s armor like tiny fists. Even Catra is rain-slick and bedraggled, a smear of fresh blood across her cheek. Adora is across from her, taking the brunt of the Horde soldiers, but she sees Catra deflect Bow’s arrows with easy grace, the way she slinks behind Glimmer to take her out at the knees and say something quietly, her smile like a tattered sunrise –

“Leave her to me,” Adora calls, sending the crush of bodies reeling with a pulse of old, borrowed power.

Bow half-salutes, says: “You sure about this? We can stay, if you need us.”

Arm around Glimmer, trying to force her to give over her weight, Adora replies, “It’s me she wants, anyway. Don’t worry about me.”

“Never,” Bow says cheerfully, pulling her in for a brief, warm hug and taking a protesting Glimmer in his arms. “Try to come back with all your limbs!”

Adora grimaces. “You’re hilarious,” she tells him, only smiling as he begins to jog away, and hefts her sword, preparing take the force of Catra’s first attack: they’re circling each other, Catra’s eyes wide and guileless and feet crossing the wet stone with easy poise. Adora is spending half her energy to avoid losing balance, and she knows it’s a wasted thought to hope Catra hasn’t noticed, because Catra has always noticed, always known.

Catra says nothing. She watches Adora: blank, calculating.

Adora had known her, once.  

Adora sinks down into an opening stance, legs braced to give enough strength to hold back Catra’s first attack, blade angled upwards and one hand free: Catra will try to knock her off-balance, give herself the advantage in the face of She-Ra’s monstrous strength.

“Never thought to try a different style?” Catra asks her. She says it like they could be anywhere but here: in the training gyms, or curled up on Adora’s bunk under the knife-scratch portraits, voices too-soft for the others to overhear. Adora blinks the rain out of her eyes and tries not to let her surprise show – they don’t do this, anymore, pretend they’re still friends, or what passed for friends in that awful, filthy city –

But Catra is still looking at her, expectant.

“I seem to remember being top of our battalion, or am I wrong?” she says drily. “If you win a few more battles, then you can give me advice.”

For once, Catra ignores the barb and just laughs. “You and I remember last time very differently,” she says, and Adora flushes thinking about it, the phantom-touch of Catra’s hands circling her neck.

“You’re the best fighter I know, Adora,” Catra tells her unexpectedly. “You’re only going to keep losing if you let yourself get distracted. But you do make it so _easy._ ”

Adora blinks. “You’ve really taken to being the new Shadow Weaver.”

“Oh, spare me,” Catra snaps. For the first time, her eyes drop to slits and Adora is viciously glad: Catra can use that façade on anyone but her, because they’ve been in this fight for too long now, and neither of them are going back.

She grips her blade tighter. Any moment, she knows. “Still so jealous,” she says; “Have you finally realized that you’ve never been anything but an imitation–”

Catra whips across the expanse of rock before Adora can finish her thought, her right arm slicing up towards Adora’s exposed neck as the left digs into Adora’s forearm and _pulls_ –

Adora exhales sharply, tilting the sword to block the upwards cut before lunging out of Catra’s reach. The five scratch-marks make a bracelet just above her wrist, the blood trickling freely down to the divots between her fingers. _Patience,_ she chastises herself, and it stings that Catra was right, that she never learns. When Catra rushes her again, she tenses and kicks out, hitting Catra in the abdomen and sending her sprawling with a spray of rainwater.

“Catra?” she calls, despite herself, but Catra doesn’t call back, not even to make her displeasure known.

She crosses the bridge warily, pushing wet hair out of her face. She thinks she’s supposed to be glad, maybe; Catra is a commanding officer of the Horde, a threat to every kingdom of Etheria, but sometimes she still looks at Catra and thinks, _that’s my friend my only friend_ even if it isn’t true, hasn’t been for years –

“Sloppy, again,” Catra whispers, through a mouthful of dark blood.

Adora tenses but it’s too late: Catra leans back, weight on her forearms, and hits with her feet to push Adora back before springing up, leaning heavily on her right leg. Still, she’s fast, moving to reach Adora and they grapple, skin slippery with the pounding rain until Adora’s boots lose grip and she staggers, falling to her knees to avoid hurtling off the side of the bridge.

It’s enough of an opening for Catra, who pins Adora with her thighs and one hand to her throat.

Slowly, Catra draws her thumb across Adora’s throat, the fresh cut burning.

Adora isn’t the only one who loses focus.

She twists her body, knocking Catra to the side, and tries to lock Catra with her weight, Catra thrashing like a sparrow beneath her, before knocking her head back against the stone, enough to stun her. When Catra moans, hand to her head, Adora scrambles backwards, leaving an empty gulf between them.

Catra sits up, stares coldly at Adora, and the muffled noise of explosions come from the direction of the shore.

“I have to – go,” Adora says, head jerking towards the sudden rain of pulse fire.

Catra’s expression wavers. “Aren’t you supposed to take me captive?” she drawls, but Adora can tell she’s bewildered.

 _Yes,_ Adora thinks, _Yes, I am,_ but straps her sword behind her back and walks away without looking back.

 

iii.

Sometimes, Adora thinks she must have imagined this strange thing between them. She thinks she must have imagined a lot. At the time, she hadn’t known: but she’d dreamt up her friends as great, devouring monsters, and those same monsters as her friends. Seen soldier-children at attention like unloaded weapons. It had surprised her, when she’d reached out to Catra, and Catra had refused. That Catra would follow her orders after Adora turned aside. She thought she knew Catra, but she’s beginning to think she knows very little at all. It seems that way, at least.

“You could’ve come with me,” she tells Catra. “I would’ve waited for you. I _did_ wait for you. I thought maybe that’s why you didn’t say yes, the first time. I thought maybe you wanted to see what I would do.”

They’re in a smoking half-circle of mechanical detritus. The sounds of battle have muted, the entire thing beginning to wind down as the troops flee towards the edges of the Kingdom of Snows. Catra’s baton flickers like static in the air. Adora believes in redemption. She believes that no one is beyond saving, that there is always another way, but Catra has never stood before her and said: _help me._ The wind roars in her ears.

Catra is watching her expectantly. Her hand is outstretched. Adora wants to reach back.

Once, she had –

Things were different then. Everything has changed, and whatever is between them should be over, but for Adora it never is.

 _Help me,_ Catra had said, and she had stepped towards Adora, confident that Adora would move towards her.

“I’m sorry,” Adora says. “I think – you don’t know me, either. Not anymore.”

She sees the wide-eyed expression on Catra’s face begin to slide away like salt-water. The snow is whirling around them, and for a moment she is sure that Catra will make her way over anyway, and run her hand over the thin, pink scar on Adora’s neck.

Still: she expects it when the soupy clouds are ruptured by a sudden wave of new fighters, their mechanical bodies sputtering in and out of her vision. _Stealth fields,_ Frosta had warned them once, but none of them had believed her. The ground around her erupts in bursts of snow and hard-packed soil, and Adora has crossed the remaining two steps to shield Catra from the blasts before she realises her body has moved.

“I really thought that would work,” Catra says. Her breathing is harsh. Like tiny little bullets. “It would’ve worked on you, before.”

Adora tenses her body against the onslaught of Horde fire. She sees Catra, strangely, at five years, or four: her lip split and eyes watering like broth. Adora had gone to her, then, and Catra had told her, _leave me alone I don’t need your help just go away_ but Adora hadn’t, had stayed right there. Things change, she thinks, and when she blinks Catra is looking at her. She does not recognise the expression.

“If you ever mean it,” she says, “You know where I am.”

 

iv.

When she had lived in the Fright Zone, Adora had always slept deep and dreamless. This changed some time after coming to Bright Moon, and she’d burst into Glimmer’s room, half out of her mind because she could’ve sworn she’d just seen Glimmer’s body snapped wetly in Hordak’s great hands.

Now, when Adora dreams, she is only ever herself, and Catra is always there; her mind flips through years of memories and so Catra is always shifting, suffused with the surreal haziness of slumber, a child one moment and a woman the next, but still ready for battle –

the color of light filtering through the dirty window is a strange kaleidoscope, and the sparks that fly up where their weapons clash are a bright, burning white, like strips of a girl’s dress, and the dark blood runs freely down Catra’s face even as she smiles –

atop a spluttering volcano, the ground rupturing beneath their feet, Catra’s silhouette drawn out against all the smoke and lava, and the heat of it has them both sweating but Catra doesn’t move away, not even when Adora closes in on her, just tilts her head up in a question while the earth beneath them continues to move –

in a strange meadow of beautiful wildflowers, and Adora has foregone the sword to fight hand-to-hand, and Catra ducks beneath Adora’s swing, her body twirling around Adora’s to press into her for the barest moment, startles Adora with its almost-familiarity, the two of them caught in a strange waltz under the first kiss of sunset –

back in the Woods, again, where it all began and Adora first lost her, but this time she says, _come with me_ and Catra will say, _yes_ –

But the worst is not that she dreams and her eyes are scratched out, thick and white and pulpy, or that she watches her friends’ broken bodies beat upon the shore, the flesh picked off by butcher-birds.

It’s that she dreams and she’s _home,_ her body like a wraith of dust and starlight, real only where Catra touches her; Catra’s fingers gentle where they trace her face, cleaning up a scrape. Of her arms encircling Catra’s waist like a prayer.

It’s that she dreams that she never left at all.

 

interlude.

In the beginning, it had been like this.

There had been only the two of them in the Horde: Adora and Catra, always together. It’s not that Adora didn’t have other friends, but rather that Catra was different, in some indescribable way. There had been Lonnie, and Kyle and Rogelio, but she had sensed that they didn’t understand her, or even _want_ to, in the way that Catra did.

She doesn’t remember first meeting Catra. She supposes it was some time when they were in the nursery, or perhaps later, in Preparatory Training. Catra didn’t remember, either: “It doesn’t matter, Adora,” she’d laughed, when Adora had asked her about it, “what matters is that we have each other now,” and Adora had agreed, because they would always have that. What matters is that one day, Catra had been there, slotting neatly into Adora’s life, and all the other kids had just melted away.

Catra had kissed her first, her hands resting on Adora’s shoulders, thumbs pressed against her neck. Adora had been bewildered, statue-still with it but her heart hammering enough to spurt open in a flurry of nails and smoke, and she remembers thinking, _I should’ve kissed back_ although it had been over all too soon for that.

“What?” Catra says flippantly, although her hands are trembling. “Don’t tell me you’re going to act surprised.”

“I’m not acting,” Adora objects, her voice uncertain, but she looks searchingly at Catra’s face. Catra has tricked her before, both in fights and for her own amusement, but never like this, never left herself so exposed. Adora’s hands clench around the empty air, and she slowly, slowly, slowly brings one up to brush her finger across Catra’s mouth.

“What are you thinking?”

Adora moves her fingertip. “I don’t know,” she says honestly. “Is Shadow Weaver about to walk in? Is Lonnie hiding in one of the lockers?” It was something Catra would do; trust her to notice this strange draw she had on Adora, like a tide, always pulling her further out. But Catra is shaking her head, a strange little dip between her brows.

“I wouldn’t do that,” she says defensively. “I wouldn’t want to _really_ hurt you.”

Laughing, Adora says, “Liar,” but she pulls Catra in close for a proper kiss anyway, fingers sliding into Catra’s hair and she feels, for the first time, like she is standing on the edge of the world, all of it laid out before her.

When she thinks of this, later, in all her loneliest moments, she wonders if things would’ve been different, if she’d stayed. If she keeps knowing Catra the way she did before the war, better than she ever knew herself. She wonders if she’d taken Catra’s hand back in Thaymor, she could’ve changed everything: the war, and the Horde, and She-Ra, and never known the way it felt to have Catra’s body thrash beneath her like a sparrow, never run her finger across an old pink scar. She wonders if it would’ve been enough, to keep knowing Catra – like a secret, like a forgotten part of herself.

It isn’t enough, of course. It never has been.

 

v.

The next time they see each other, the Rebellion is launching its first attack on the Fright Zone.

The cold metal city is burning, being slowly devoured by towering geysers of fire that are tearing the sky apart with smoke and sprays of pulse-fire, the buildings haloed with bloodshot light and the stars falling one by one. The Horde forces are impenetrable, even now, and Adora is sure they’ll have to call a retreat or risk the decimation of their armies. Scattered around her is what seems like half of the Horde, scrambling back whenever she aims her sword their way, when beneath the frantic scream of collapsing steel, she hears –

Adora wills herself to focus, operating on instinct to drive back to the mass of soldiers. Her blade swings and she cuts down one, and another, and uses her borrowed strength to launch their own machinery into the center of the crowd. The resultant explosion is _deafening,_ sweeping her into the side of a building, ears ringing and the sickly stench of burning flesh caught in her throat.

When she looks up, a familiar figure is switchblade-cut against the sharp glare of the flames.

“Hey, Adora,” Catra says, like it hasn’t been _months,_ and Adora won’t _let_ her – she springs back on her hands to jump upwards, the strange, hot feeling in her chest burning brighter now as she strikes hard with her blade, the death of her home city shrieking in her ears.

 But this time, Catra meets her, her staff holding back the fierce weight of Adora’s swing. Adora grits her teeth, holds on to this awful, primal something that is blazing inside of her, and forces Catra to stumble backwards with a shove, driving her into an unmoving huddle of bodies. Once Catra looks up, her face settling into the mean, cold lines that only Adora knows, Adora is waiting: feet braced and her left leg leading, her blade drawn up to rest the cross against her cheekbone, the point aimed at Catra’s head.

“Finally given up on me, then?” Catra asks, head titled in observation. Her tone is deceptively bland, and if Adora couldn’t see her face she would think this is a conversation taking place anywhere else.

She smiles. Feels the hot ash brush past her skin. “It doesn’t have to be like this.”

Instead of answering, Catra slips into her own stance, her weight resting on the back foot, her front pointed and perpendicular; she looks fey, about to disappear into the smoke.

Adora attacks first: she always has, and she’s _angry,_ suddenly, that Catra is here, that this is happening, that this is what’s become of them. She descends on Catra in a tempest, striking with furious, hard blows and parries. 

They cross blades in a dizzying rush of snapping electricity, one of them always taking the lead in a deadly, whirling choreography. _Focus,_ she tells herself in a mantra, ignoring the movements of Catra’s mouth and whatever words spill out of it like fog. _Focus,_ and staunches the beating tide of rage in her chest like a still-bleeding cut. This is something Catra has never struggled with.

Before long, they’re the only ones left, circling each other in the center of this putrefying city. Nearly all the exits are blocked by fallen machinery, still burning and occasionally erupting in sudden, blistering bursts, and now neither of them can leave.

Catra breaks the distance, her body grazing past Adora’s, and the meeting of their weapons explodes in a bright, cold blast of light _._ Adora ducks around her, her hand skimming Catra’s tensed thigh; they dance, Catra’s leg pressed to hers, and sometimes chest to chest in the blackened dirt, and then someone will writhe free and Adora will get the briefest touch of Catra’s hair against her arm, and sometimes she rests her fingers on Catra’s forearm like needlepoints.

This is how it ends:

The dust has settled underfoot, and the city is still crashing down but the fire has sated its gnawing hunger, and Adora stands, gasping, across from the only person she has ever wholly known.  She isn’t sure how it happened: a maelstrom of blows, perhaps, parried and countered and now they’re both caught, breathing in the same dirty air. She can feel the press of Catra’s body all along her own, and the warmth of her skin in Adora’s hand where she has Catra’s wrist in an unbreakable lock. Her blade has skidded across the space, gleaming amongst all of the filth, and she is staring into Catra’s wide eyes.

One of Catra’s feet is braced on Adora’s thigh. Her spare hand, when she lifts it to Adora’s face, shakes. Adora knows that hand: knows its quick, jagged, violence, and the white-line scar under the ring finger from a training accident, and how they feel in her own.

Catra bows her head, forehead against Adora’s neck like a benediction in repose. “I can’t leave you behind,” she gasps, “I keep _trying,_ and every time you’re there – I see you _everywhere,_ even when I sleep–” and she surges upwards to press her mouth against Adora’s: another bruise.

Adora falls into it, the ease of it, until she rips herself away to murmur, “Stay with me,” tracing the words against Catra’s cheek, and feels her shudder.

“Oh, Adora,” Catra rasps, her voice like sharp wire. “You never learn.”

Adora steps away first. It seems she never does anything else.

 

Later, when she’s hauling herself into the skiff that will take them back to Bright Moon, her mouth tasting of ashes and old rust, she allows herself one last look behind her. Down in the square, Catra’s lonely silhouette is cut out against the dust, the city burning and burning all around her until Catra is nothing more than an impression of smoke and fire. Adora lifts her hand to trace the knot of scarring across her neck, and watches until Catra disappears, until the skiff pulls away and the night air closes in.


End file.
